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TechSpot’s History of the GPU
The modern graphics processor has become one of the largest, most complex, and most expensive components found in almost any computing device. From the early VGA days to the modern GPU. The history and evolution of the chip that came to dominate gaming, and later AI and compute.
1976 – 1995:
The Early Days of 3D Consumer Graphics
The first true 3D graphics originated with early display controllers, known as video shifters and video address generators. These devices acted as a pass-through between the main processor and the display. They converted the incoming data stream into a serial bitmapped video output, which included luminance, color, and vertical and horizontal composite sync. This synchronization was crucial for maintaining the alignment of pixels in a display generation, ensuring the orderly progression of each successive line, and managing the blanking interval (the time between ending one scan line and starting the next).
A flurry of designs emerged in the latter half of the 1970s, laying the foundation for 3D graphics as we know them. One notable example was RCA’s “Pixie” video chip (CDP1861), introduced in 1976. It was capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible video signal at a resolution of 62×128, or 64×32 for the short-lived RCA Studio II console.